The Self?

The self at any given moment is a made self — it is not a solid independent machine for deciding and acting efficiently or rationally in response to stimuli, but is itself a process, fluid and elusive, whose present range of possible responses is part of a developing story. The self is — one might say — what the past is doing now. It is continuity and so it is necessarily memory – continuity seen as the shape of a unique story, my story, which I own, acknowledge as mine. To be a self is to own such a story; to act as a self is to act out of the awareness of this resource of a particular past.